“You can’t untell a tale…you can’t outslow a snail.”
- Bobby Bird, Chonto
The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah kicks off today and Eric will be blogging live all weekend as he covers the best in the Short Film Program. Check back throughout the holiday weekend for reviews, links, and maybe even some of the actual shorts themselves posted right here! This blog is also a part of the live coverage over at DigitalContentProducer.com, where Eric works as an associate editor. Head on over there for a podcast with Michel Gondry (”Eternal Sunshine,” “Be Kind, Rewind”) and more…
This year, 45 of the 83 short films in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival are available at for viewing and/or download at iTunes, Netflix, and Xbox.com.
Carson Mell follows last year’s Sundance-featured short film Bobby Bird: The Devil in Denim with another adventure of the aging former rock star. The 2008 animation short program features Chonto, a relatively somber yet bizarrely amusing film about Bobby’s search for a true friend. An obnoxious roadie named Rufus forces the rocker, in a flashback to his younger days, to consider something other than human companionship. A dog is too common, and a big shot like Bobby needs a “big-shot dog,” so he goes to a South American zoo to adopt a monkey.
Mell’s animation style is an interesting mix of photo-real backgrounds and stark, crisply drawn cartoon images that have very little mobility. Deep colors enrich the surrounding photos, but the characters themselves are flat images with barely any shading. Camera movement is mostly limited to slowly zooming in or out, and it makes for a very deliberate tone. Ironically, it is this approach, juxtaposed against Bobby’s homespun seen-it-all rocker mentality and his Southern drawl, that makes Chonto so charming.
Bobby has a laconic Nicholas Cage-Raising Arizona kind of vocal delivery and he narrates the entire 14-minute short. This narration eventually takes over as the main factor that determines the film’s mood and feel. Chonto is almost like a picture gallery with captions, as Bobby sits in a chair reflecting back on an important time in his life. Since there isn’t a lot of mobility in the animation itself, Mell has a simple and effective solution for scenes—mostly Bobby’s— with a heavy amount of dialogue. Filmed footage of an actual moving mouth is inserted onto the cartoon drawing, and it fits in perfect with the film’s austere, low-key aesthetic. And the little bit of upper lip stubble that peppers every character is a nice touch, especially since it makes me wonder if it isn’t the same person’s mouth every time.
Mell has made Bobby Bird something of a multimedia institution. Available at his website, carsonmell.com, is Saguaro, a book with full-color illustrations that is a “frank, first-person chronicle of Bobby’s life and adventures…featuring tales of unrequited affection and battles with Satan worshippers on the high seas.” McSweeney’s DVD magazine Wolphin featured Bobby Bird: The Devil in Denim and an interview with the filmmaker in their 3rd issue. Watch an earlier Carson Mell short film entitled The Writer right here at YouTube, and see the trailer for Chonto below:
